this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2026
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FYI, not all bird glass has visible fritting. They also come with UV reflective coatings that are almost transparent to the human eye (unless you're really close to the glass), e.g.,
Some UV treatments are stripes, others similar to an elongated version of the fritting from OP, and then there's the camo-stick-like version above. Stripes are the most noticeable to humans.
ETA: From personal experience, the glass is completely transparent from ~2+ meters away, and you have to be very close or staring directly at glare from the sun to see it when <2m away.
ETA2: Someone else shared the Wikipedia article on bird collisions below, but I wanted to take a second to highlight this graph from the article:
If you think bird safe glass is cool, spaying/neutering your cats and keeping them inside or on a leash is waaay cooler.
(This graph doesn't include indirect causes of death like climate change, deforestation, and pesticide use, but that doesn't make responsible pet ownership any less cool)
That's blowing my mind that birds, masters of the sky - a realm to which they can easily escape to where few can follow, are such a frequent snack for cats, who under usual circumstances don't often fly. Cats are like ninjas.
Cats are expert hunters
I had an indoor/outdoor cat that would catch birds at night, bring them home dead , and play with them.
What a mess.
Next cat would only go out during the day and lay around. He did manage to catch two rats
My cat ran a mouse up my curtain yestetday. Came to bed, there’s a cat just staring up at the wall over my bed.. I figured it was greebles, but then the mouse poked it’s head out of the grommets..
Needless to say I managed to scare it off the curtain and we teamed up to get it out of the house.
My cats don’t get to go outside. I used to have a free-access catio, but a former cat would bring chipmunks inside and let them go, and once kept a dead squirrel in a box in an unused closet for three days while he ate it (i didn’t actually think to look in the closet he kept going into, cats are weird and do weird things..), so…. That’s not allowed anymore.
My parents at would do the same with chipmunks.
That cat would also growl at kids waking home from school while sitting inside near the window.
Pretty wild to think these goofy furballs we keep around as pets are apex predators.
I had a cat one time that liked to play fetch. Just like a dog. Never seen anything like it.
they are not apex predators.
cats are prey for larger animals and are often killed my racoons and other stronger animals.
They occasionally get taken by eagles here. Small dogs too.
Not sure house cats count as apex predators because they are also prey animals. A tiger is an apex predator because what eats tigers? But there's stuff that'll eat house cats.
Nevertheless house cats are extremely effective at hunting small prey. I had a maine coon that drove my city block's vole population extinct for a good ten years. Big dude either loved digging or hated voles.
I had a cat like that :)
Colorpoint shorthairs (the ones that look like regular cats, not necessarily the over-bread siamese) are known for that sort of behavior. Mine was a cream colorpoint, and basically looked solid white, but “catdog” is how that breed is normally described, because they tend to be wildly friendly and play fetch.
I had a blue point that was a mouse hunter and she was so proud of every kill. She's do her little proud walk with it in her mouth and everything like, "hey look what I got!"
Gotta land sometime, bitch 🐈⬛
There's that time of the year when birds land, make nests, lay eggs and have to hang around to feed their young. That's a very vulnerable time for them. Make sure your bird house and bird feeder are cat proof.
I once physically removed a still living bird from my cats clutches and set it free. I saw him get it. Birds are just fucking oblivious. Standing around pecking at the ground and not checking their surroundings.
The graph's message is clear: immediately dismantle all wind turbines and ramp up clean coal!
/s
"Beautiful, clean coal."
Also note how low wind turbines actually are on that list. The oil industry lives to harp on the number of birds killed by wind turbines, but you never hear them about the much larger number of birds killed by vehicles.
Still worth reducing every number on that list of course, but keep some perspective.
Many of these graphs were made to show that windmills do not really contribute to bird death.
So all of the windows in NYC look like Eddie Van Halen's guitar to birds?
Neat.
They're starting to crack down on cats in my area. They have a curfew. In some districts, they are not allowed outside. There are areas near me where cats are outright banned.
The birds that die near me tend to hit the glass then fall into my dog's mouth. The cleaner the glass, the more it happens.
The cats have a curfew? Have you met cats?
If they break curfew, they are captured and kept in cages. They might be forcefully sterilized or even killed via lethal injection.
If you have a problem with feral cats in an area, find a secluded spot nearby and plant catnip.
You will now have feral cats that are high AF & not killing shit.
Wait until you figure out how many birds humans kill.
I think I read something like 90% of the cat killings come from non-pet cats, and there's maybe three pets for every four to five strays. Obviously, spay/neuter is the best defense, and on top of that maybe going a step further and trapping your local strays. And unless we start treating stray cats like pests, I'm not sure how doable it is to try to call the population via spay neuter.
And I'll be honest, I'm less concerned about the mammals deaths, because I'd never be mad at my car for catching mice. Catch mice all day dude.
And if I'm being really honest, I think some birds are real assholes, but maybe that's a discussion for another day.
Someone should figure out how to paint cats so that birds can avoid them.
They have.
Birdsafe collars reduce bird catches by 87%. (A bell will reduce bird catches by 41%).
https://www.usgs.gov/publications/how-effective-birdsbesafer-cat-collar-reducing-bird-mortality-domestic-cats
Ha! That's really cool!
I wonder what percent of those cats are strays.
the vast majority. feral cats are about 50-65% of the cat population, but people take stats like this and demonize their neighbors who let the cat sit on the porch outside.
i was banned from reddit 5 years ago for posting a picture of my cat chilling on my porch, because the anti-cat nutjobs reported me to admin for 'inciting violence'. it's frequent that in the past few years when photo see my cat outside chillin' or even a photo of him in my backyard chill, they ream me out about how I am a anti-bird Nazi.
my cat has never killed a bird. he killed a couple of baby rabbits which were in my garden.
Where do you think feral cats come from? They are domestic cats which live outside, sometimes by choice, sometimes because they are abandoned, and sometimes because they are born to an outdoor/feral car.
Where did all those stray feral cats come from?
How do these numbers compare to the number of chickens, turkeys, and ducks killed in animal agriculture? I think those are human-related deaths, so it's a bit odd to me they're not included. (I would assume they blow these numbers out of the water)
It's not actually, since that isn't what the graph is about.
I believe that chickens and other farm birds account for something like 50-60% of all the birds alive at any given time.
With some very hand-wavy maths I'd say its at least a 10x increase. ~50+ billion slaughtered for food vs ~4 billion from outdoor cats. Don't quote me on that, they're just the first two numbers I came across.
I'd argue it's somewhat fair to exclude agriculture from the original chart because the damage cats do to wild bird populations is off the charts and owners should recognise that reality.
I knew it was bad, but its nice to see it in context like this. I love cats, but have never been able to afford them. They'll ve rescues and be trapped inside ;getting smooshed in my arms.
Thanks.
When they say Vehicles i bet a LOT of that is airplanes. Bird strikes are more common than you'd think.
Is the cat issue specific to the Americas or something? Because here in Europe we've had cats for thousands of years and in Africa they existed long before that even, so I don't see how some pets getting out sometimes is any worse than the feral cats that existed long ago
Domestic cats that go out to hunt aren't controlled by natural causes, like food availability for example. But they go out at night to hunt nonetheless, and they're usually in their peak conditions because they don't have to go hungry for long periods of time.
As numbers that I am aware of,
With a cat population of Germany approximately 15 million, most of which are permanently indoor, the rest are keeping themselves very busy for no reason